Neurogenesis & DNA Repair - Decoding Bird Language - Turtle Migration - Ape Laughter

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Jun 27, 2026, 7:22:09 AM (2 days ago) Jun 27

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brains-break-repair-dna-grow

Brains break and repair DNA to grow

By Michael Howerton

Healthy brains may be built through a process of controlled damage and rapid repair.

The most dangerous type of DNA damage is a regular feature of healthy early brain development, experiments in mice show. As newborn neurons squeeze through the cramped, narrow spaces of developing brain tissue, they break both strands of their DNA, researchers report June 17 in Nature. The breaks are repaired once neurons reach their destination, usually within a day.

It’s a paradox of vulnerability and resilience. Newborn neurons routinely sustain a kind of damage that kills most cells, yet they repair it and emerge intact, the researchers found.

The speed of the repair surprised the team. “Somehow neurons can repair [the damage] very quickly without any sign of mutations or bad effect,” says neurobiologist Mineko Kengaku of Kyoto University in Japan. “It seems to be a normal developmental event.”

The breaks appear in areas of the genome that aren’t crucial, the team found, which in most cases allows neurons to survive and grow without lasting damage. “It is surprising that, during evolution, the mammalian brain acquires such a clever strategy,” Kengaku says.

More research is needed to understand the implications beyond mice, but Kengaku says the effect might even be more pronounced in humans. “During development, neurons have to migrate, and if the brain size is larger, then neurons have to migrate longer distances,” she says. “It is quite likely that neurons in human brains probably generate more DNA damage during development” than neurons in mice brains do.

But a flawless break-and-repair cycle is not always guaranteed, Kengaku says. When it fails or is incomplete, the damage could persist. These instances, she says, could help explain some neurological conditions later in life.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/26/human-animal-communication-step-closer-scientist-wins-prize-for-decoding-birdsong

A little bird told her: scientist wins $100,000 prize for decoding birdsong

Ian Sample Science editor

A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response.

Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings.

Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same.

“I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”.

The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication.

Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said.

For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/science/birds-acoustics-birdsong.html

How a Bird’s Habitat Can Change Its Song

By K. R. Callaway

In the flatwoods of South Florida, tiny brown birds emerge from the underbrush to sing from the branches of pine trees. To human ears, their songs sound nearly identical, but any given population of these birds — Bachman’s sparrows — uses as many as 120 different song types to communicate.

Like human language, birdsong is dynamic. Every avian generation makes choices about which songs to continue singing, which to improve upon and which to drop altogether. A single Bachman’s sparrow might learn only 48 of the songs used by its community, and for decades researchers have been trying to figure out how baby sparrows choose which songs to adopt.

Previous studies have focused on social and cultural factors. During their critical song-learning phase of development, young songbirds imitate the adult males in their group who are successful in courtship or have elaborately ornamented plumage.

Now, a new study of Bachman’s sparrows reveals another possible part of the equation: the physical environment. Trees, dense shrubs and even wind can scatter or block the transmission of some sound waves, and researchers suspect that young sparrows are less likely to latch onto degraded songs, leading in turn to some songs becoming rarer than others.

“The rarer song types don’t propagate quite as well over distance than the common ones do,” said Rindy Anderson, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the study, which appeared on March 24 in the journal Bioacoustics.

All the Bachman’s sparrow song types have a similar form, with a buzzing or whistling note followed by a trill. Some trills are faster or slower than others, and some complex songs contain trills of several frequencies.

Researchers recorded a variety of rare and common sparrow songs and then rerecorded them playing in different environments — among dense trees, windy plains and other places that Bachman’s sparrows frequent but that could distort audio signals. Under these conditions, the researchers found that rarer songs did not propagate as well as common songs.

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https://www.science.org/content/article/migrating-sea-turtles-only-sort-know-where-they-re-going

Migrating sea turtles only sort of know where they’re going

By Phie Jacobs

When Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in 1836, he was perplexed by the vast numbers of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) nesting on its beaches. Every mating season, these intrepid reptiles leave their feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and journey more than 2000 kilometers across the sea to lay their eggs on this tiny, remote island. How, Darwin later mused in a letter to Nature, did the animals find their way to a “speck of land in the midst of the great Atlantic Ocean?”

Since then, scientists have uncovered convincing evidence that sea turtles can sense components of Earth’s geomagnetic field. Now, data collected using a new kind of tracking device lend further support to the idea that these animals use magnetic maps to navigate during their transoceanic voyages. But the system is far from perfect, researchers report today in Science Advances, which means migrating turtles must periodically reorient themselves after veering off course.

The findings fit “very comfortably with what we know about turtle navigation,” says Kenneth Lohmann, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wasn’t involved in the research. His team previously conducted laboratory studies demonstrating turtles can sense the strength of geomagnetic fields as well as their angle relative to the surface of Earth—potentially providing migrating turtles with a “bicoordinate” geomagnetic map of their surroundings. Exactly how good they are at using those coordinates in the open ocean, however, has been less clear.

Graeme Hays, a marine ecologist at Deakin University, paid his own visit to Ascension Island back in the 1990s. While there, he and Paolo Luschi—now a biologist at the University of Pisa—worked to outfit green sea turtles with satellite tracking devices. Early on, Hays recalls, the pair recognized a significant limitation: Although these tags can accurately track a turtle’s path across the ocean, those data don’t necessarily reflect “where the animal is trying to go.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/science/evolution-laughter-apes.html

To Reveal the Rhythmic Roots of Laughter, Just Tickle an Ape

By Emily Anthes

Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere.

And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut. All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study.

The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans than in these other primate species. While nonhuman apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed, humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found.

“I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study. “We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.”

This wide-ranging repertoire requires significant vocal flexibility and control — the same skills that humans would have needed for spoken language.

The study demonstrates the “uniqueness of human laughter,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research. “It provides a window into human vocal evolution.”

In the new study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, the researchers analyzed the recorded laughter of four children and 13 young, captive apes: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos and four chimpanzees. Some of the recordings featured laughter produced during play, while others captured laughter elicited by tickling.

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/decision-making/cooperating-marmosets-extend-decision-making-model-of-the-brain/

Cooperating marmosets extend decision-making model of the brain

By Calli McMurray

Kanga the marmoset places her hand on the lever and looks at Dodson, a fellow marmoset working with her on a task. As it becomes apparent that Dodson is ready to pull his own lever, neurons in Kanga’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ramp up their firing. The activity reaches its peak as Kanga decides to pull the lever, in sync with her partner. As a reward for their coordinated effort, both marmosets earn a sip of liquid marshmallow fluff.

This type of neuronal computation underlies the “evidence accumulation model,” a major theory of how perceptual decisions are made: The brain gathers evidence and executes a decision once the evidence reaches a certain threshold. The marmoset study, which was published last month in Neuron, demonstrates that the model also applies to social decisions.

This result wasn’t a given; making a social decision relies on the changing behavior of another animal, and the actions of the decider can influence what the other animal does, says study investigator Monika Jadi, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University. “It’s a very recurrent system,” she says.

Support for the evidence accumulation model has come largely from highly controlled experiments; the fact that the same activity pattern appears in a social and less constrained task “implies that this is a generalizable computation,” says Timothy Hanks, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work.

Social, perceptual, foraging and other decisions are “categories we’ve created,” but there may not be anything “acutely different” about them, says Cory Miller, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “I love this line of work; I think it’s super powerful.”